Obamacare Is Not Apple

One of the Obama administration’s talking points about Obamacare has been that Apple’s new iPhone 5000 or whatever has been having glitches, just like Obamacare. Apple is the perfect company to the left, all artsy and creative (and in no way an evil big business… even though it’s among the largest in the world). So Obamacare is just having glitches like new Apple products do, and you love Apple, don’t you?

Problem is, you don’t have to buy an iPhone or an iPad or iMat or iCarpet or whatever the latest iDohickey is. And if you don’t buy the iThing, the IRS doesn’t confiscate your pay to tax you for the iThing that’s mandated by law for you to buy as a tax… even though it’s “insurance”… but it’s a tax.

Via Ed at HotAir, Nick Gillespie of Reasontv expounds on a few points:

Gillespie is a pretty libertarian guy, but he doesn’t give the importance to the first one that it deserves.

Obamacare makes it so you can’t just buy a health insurance plan for huge emergencies. If you’re young and healthy, there’s no reason you need a “cadillac plan”. You can get by with bare bones plans that are only there for critical emergencies like major injuries or critical illness. You don’t need to go to the doc every day for aches and pains because you’re in your 20s and in good shape… but now, with Obamacare, you’re forced to buy the high-coverage plan because that way you’ll have “good coverage”.

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The comparison has been made to car insurance before (it’s a totally wrong comparison in one sense, because many people don’t own cars, and if you don’t drive a car on public roads, you don’t need insurance and government can’t force you to buy it), but in this case, consider it the difference between liability and full coverage.

Before, you got liability insurance in case of a big accident, because it wasn’t critical because your car doesn’t need full coverage – it’s not high maintenance. Like someone young who can bounce back, you can just pound the dent out of your cheap commuter car and it’s good as new.

Now you’re mandated to buy full expensive coverage because government is “helping” you get better coverage…. by mandating you pay for it.

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To compare it to Apple, it would be as though the Obama administration had put out a new “Obamaphone Affordability Act” and simply done away with every brand but the iPhone 5000 or whatever the newest model is. Sure, all you need is your Nokia or your Motorola Razor you’ve had for years, but now those phones’ plans have been discontinued, and you can either buy a new iPhone 5000 or comparable expensive phone… or you can get fined.

You lost the service you wanted, and you get told you’re being provided better service – all by killing the freedom to choose.

The first year is the $95 tax per person (or 1% of income, whichever is higher), after that it’s a percentage of your income that rises from there on in. And of course the fact that you don’t have health insurance – health insurance you might have been able to buy before as catastrophic insurance (think auto liability vs full coverage).

The big problem is that it’s 22000 pages of regulations (see “red tape tower”). And if you don’t have health insurance and need it, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive.

There are already a lot of anecdotal stories of folks having their rates skyrocket, because Obamacare mandates that insurers cover you with “cadillac” plans. Well, much like if the govt decided to ban all vehicles except cadillacs, people would find that a caddy is a lot more expensive than the Kia they had that met all their needs.

Again, if all you want is liability, no reason to buy full coverage. If all you need is a Kia, no reason to buy a Cadillac.

Those costs of compliance and costs for insurance and reduced coverage and care as doctors bail on Obamacare means there are also a lot of hidden costs beyond just the direct penalties.

But keep in mind, the objective is single payer. Obama preached many times in favor of single payer. Harry Reid said Obamacare was a step to single payer. Heck, Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last night grilled HHS Secretary (and Hatch Act violator) Kathleen Sebelius and suggested they should’ve gone to single payer – the elites in government and media are all for it. For those who make $20 million/year like Stewart, or are high up in government, they don’t have to worry about getting stuck in a clinic with no space or service.

They won’t be drinking from potted plants like patients in British hospitals, or being told there are no more x-rays for the fiscal year like Canadian patients.